


Fantasia on a Theme about Nicky's Ass

by doctor_denmark



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Classical Music, Gen, M/M, Nile is the Little Sister
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25807921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctor_denmark/pseuds/doctor_denmark
Summary: In which Joe wrote Tudor Anaconda and Nile is not prepared for that.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 36
Kudos: 241





	Fantasia on a Theme about Nicky's Ass

**Author's Note:**

> I'm...sorry? 
> 
> Thanks to the Discord for encouraging this and musictoyourlips for the beta.

It starts...actually Nile has no fucking clue how it starts, because her life went off the rails a while ago and logical progressions of events don’t really seem to exist any more. This isn’t even a thing about how she’s now apparently immortal. That shit started at boot camp. 

She and Nicky do not share a taste in music. Like, apparently his appreciation for it stopped at some point in the sixteenth century. Nile is not, like, prejudiced against music made more than 20 years ago. Her mom loves classical music, and she grew up with the radio tuned to WFMT in the kitchen at all times. But if she has to listen to any more Thomas Tallis polyphony she is going to shoot Nicky in the face. And then Joe will kill her. And fine, whatever. No harm, no foul, but they’re staying in a pretty nice hotel this month, and the clean up after Joe disembowels her will be messy. 

So, she falls back on her extensive experience of annoying her brother. Because that’s what Joe and Nicky are, her brothers. Andy is not her sibling. Andy is... something Nile is not letting herself think about that much right now. 

‘Just...this...what is the point?” Nicky grumbles about Post Malone. She can tell the mumbling gets to him, but it’s not quite the impact she’s going for. 

You Need to Calm Down gets a slightly better reaction. Nile is mostly there for Taylor Swift, but even she can admit that this song is far from her girl’s best work. Nicky’s face is just a picture of displeasure. 

The Apple Music Hot Country playlist is a step in the wrong direction. Nicky definitely doesn’t love all of it, but he appreciates the vocal harmonies. Of course he does. She sees him sneak a look at her phone to see what the song is at least once, which is both hilarious and annoying. Because if his taste is now Tudor choral music and Nashville?….Yeah.

In fact it’s a total and complete accident when she finally gets him to completely lose it. She doesn’t even realize Nicky and Joe have returned from wherever they were. (Probably fucking on the beach.)

“What the actual fuck are you listening to?”

“Uhhhh…” Nile tries to close the tab but it keeps playing. 

Nicky leans over her shoulder. “Sweet Dreams are made of this. Medieval Version.”

Nile feels her face heating up. “I don’t know. YouTube spiral.”

It’s not. She sub’d to Hildegarde Von Blingen’ like a month ago. 

“Is that a fucking pan pipe?” Nicky asks. “And a harpsichord?”

He looks genuinely upset. 

Nile shrugs and starts to enjoy this. She makes a mental note to make them watch A Knight’s Tale. And Kingdom of Heaven.

“Joe!” Nicky yells. “Come listen to this!”

“What, Habibi?” 

“Just fucking listen. This is apparently a medieval style.”

“Are those fucking pan pipes?”

“I don’t know,” Nile says. “It’s a thing. Bardcore, or something.”

She’s listened to Hildegarde’s version of Creep about 500 times on Soundcloud. 

The playlist moves onto a version of Bad Guy. Nicky and Joe shudder in unison. 

“The fuck? That is a violin and why is this a ‘medieval version’-” Joe has never sounded more derisive - “when the picture is clearly from the seventeenth fucking century.”

“It’s a bunch of kids on YouTube,” Nile says. “It’s basically all the same to them.”

“You’ll get this one day,” Nicky says. “A couple of hundred years from now someone will be like, oh Lottie Collins and Beyonce, that’s basically the same thing.”

Nile rolls her eyes. “I don’t even know who that is.”

“Exactly!” Joe says. “And like worse, you’ll remember this song you really liked, and you can’t quite remember how it goes, but it’s just gone, forever.” 

“Fuck,” Nicky says. “That’s like the worst. You remember that song from when we were in...I want to say Oran? Maybe 1750? Definitely the Spanish were in charge.”

“Oh shit.” Joe looks up at the ceiling. 

“Right?” 

“Ok, but like remember that we now have the ability to make recordings of stuff.” And now she’s thinking about it, she’s going to make a plan. Apple Music isn’t going to cut it for making sure she doesn’t ever lose the ability to go back and listen to Frank Ocean in 300 years time. She can store that shit in Andy’s cave with the fucking Rodin. 

“Oh, or that song you wrote me,” Nicky says to Joe. 

“Which one, ya amar? I wrote you a lot of songs.” Joe pulls Nicky to him and kisses him. 

“You know which one.”

“Ohhhhh,” Joe grins filthily. “That song. How does it go?”

Nicky hums a little. 

“Right.” Joe says. “Right.” He starts singing and, ok, his voice is not bad. She doesn’t really get the lyrics because her Arabic is not great, but she gets enough that...ew. Joe squeezes Nicky’s ass as he sings to him. Yep, that is a song about Nicky’s ass. And that’s not the thing that is blowing her mind. 

“The fuck,” she asks. 

Joe keeps singing, grinning at her lazily. 

“You wrote that?” He can’t have. 

Joe finishes the song and kisses Nicky again. “I was inspired.” 

“No, but like, not the music,” Nile says. Because he can’t have. “Just the words.”

Joe gives her a weird look. “I fucked around a lot on the lute,” he says. “It’s not a big thing.”

But it is. “You wrote that song. You wrote ‘Like the Apple’?” He can’t have. Except…

Nile has seen her mom’s wedding video. She used to watch it when she was feeling especially sad. And she comes to the horrifying realisation that her mom, the most beautiful bride, walked down the aisle to a song about Nicky’s ass. 

“It’s not even that great an ass!” she yells, and goes to lock herself in the bathroom for a while. 

She has to force herself to leave the bathroom before she’s ready. It’s a practical thing, because if she doesn’t then Joe and Nicky will start fucking and she’ll either have to stay in the bathroom until they’re done or just walk out ignoring them. Her phone does not have enough battery left to stay in the bathroom for that long and while she has accepted that she will see and hear Nicky and Joe fucking, she isn’t going to put herself through that if it can be avoided. Like...those are her brothers, so ew. 

She pulls herself together, throws open the door and marches out to see Nicky and Joe sprawled on the bed and for once nobody’s dick is out. Thankfully they’re just watching The Great British Baking Show on Netflix. 

“That song you wrote,” she starts. Joe and Nicky both look up at her in unison. “You realise it’s like...famous?”

“It’s just a song,” Joe says, and Nile dies inside a little. 

“No, like...ok did any of you pay attention to pop culture at all any time after 1600?”

“Sure,” Nicky says. “But after the whole, you know, Quynh thing we didn’t really spend much time in Europe for a few hundred years.”

“By the time we got back opera was a thing, and Wolfgang was fun, but...” Nicky pulls a face.

Nope, Nile is not going there. 

“But how did your song get famous,” Nile asks. 

Joe shrugs. “I don’t know. I wasn’t like out there in the tavern playing it.” 

Nile’s mind provides her an incredibly clear picture of Joe playing a lute in a tavern. Except her reference for that is Jaskir in the Witcher tv show, with his doublet hanging open, which...she makes a mental note to make them watch the Witcher too. And Game of Thrones. And Kingdom, because zombies. Fantasy stories which like, pick from a bunch of different centuries for their look should annoy them a lot. 

“You did let Will use it in one of his plays,” Nicky adds casually. 

Nope. Just. Nope.

“Oh, right,” Joe says. As if this is in any way a normal thing. “Yeah, I translated the words for him because his attempt to learn any other languages was embarrassing.”

“Other than his pick up lines,” Nicky says, raising his eyebrows significantly. 

“Those were still embarrassing.” Joe says, grinning filthily. 

“Ok, I’m not going to even unpack the fact you guys were banging Shakespeare back in the day.” Nile cannot. This, Andy and Rodin. She needs to find some up and coming composer or something so that she has stories about fucking cultural icons in a couple of hundred years. 

“Can we get back to the fact that you wrote a song about Nicky’s ass.” 

“Can you blame me?” Joe asks. Which yes, she can, because Nicky’s ass is kind of flat, and Joe should not be blinded by a millennium of tapping it. But that is derailing the conversation. 

“You wrote a song, you let your side piece William fucking Shakespear use it, and several fucking hundred years later Vaughan Williams revives it?” 

“I think I met him,” Nicky says. “Greece? He was an ambulance driver?”

“Please tell me you didn’t fuck Vaughan Williams too.” She cannot lose the ability to listen to her mom’s favourite composer. 

Nicky looks at her as if she’s crazy, which, that is a valid question given certain recent revelations about William fucking Shakespeare. 

“Just...here.” She pulls out her phone and finds it. “Fantasia on Like the Apple.” Playing it over her phone speakers is really not the way to listen to this, but…

“Oh,” Joe says after listening to a couple of minutes. “That’s…”

“Raff was good,” Nicky says. “Someone told me he was a composer but I don’t know if I ever heard his stuff.”

“This is just…” Nile tries to sort through her thoughts. “You kind of blew my mind. Like, the Rodin thing, but like...my mom had this played at her wedding.”

Joe’s expression softens. “That’s...lovely,” he says finally. 

“Nobody mentions Shakespeare used it,” Nile says. 

“Some of his plays sucked,” Joe says. “They definitely didn’t all make it 500 years.”

Nile puts a pin in that, because she’s definitely going to come back and ask about the lost Shakespeare play with an ode to an ass in it. 

“It’s supposedly an English folk song about, like, Adam and Eve, and forbidden fruit.” It’s still playing in the background. “Except it’s Tudor Anaconda.”

Nicky and Joe obviously do not get that reference. 

“Am I your original sin?” Nicky asks Joe, smirking. 

“You’re the whole of creation, my love.” Joe kisses Nicky softly and with the kind of tenderness which is genuinely uncomfortable to see. 

And, ok, Nile now feels a little bad that she’s cockblocking them. She leaves her phone, the music still playing in the background as Joe and Nicky smile at each other, foreheads pressed together. 

“I’m...going to go find Andy.” She waves at them awkwardly but she doesn’t think they really hear her. 

They’re in their own little world, and maybe it is appropriate that her mom played a song written about a love that has lasted a millennia at her wedding. Even if it is about an objectively non-apple shaped ass.


End file.
